Elevator Pitch: Splitsville

Elevator Pitch is a regular feature on Lifehacker where we profile startups and new companies and pick their brains for entrepreneurial advice. This week, we're talking with Tara Averill from Splitsville.

In 128 words or less, explain your business idea.

If you've never experienced an emotional break-up, maybe you've never dated, and half of us will experience divorce at least once in our lives. Experiences like these deserve their own life transition platform. In the same way we prepare for marriage, babies and graduations, we help you not only prepare for the split, but hopefully enable you to avoid one as well. Splitsville is bringing all the content, community, support, goods and services around this life event into one very well-designed commercial platform.

What strategies are you using to grow and finance your idea?

We have developed and are iterating a very specific product roadmap and strategy that will enable a multi-generational and multi-cultural users to consider Splitsville their trusted life event community. Investors on the other hand get to see that this is a very long life platform with years of stickiness per customer if we are delivering the community and content those in 'Splitsville' need. Truth be told, I was in Splitsville two years before the actual end of my marriage. I needed Google to spit out Splitsville as a result when I typed in "Am I a bad person for wanting to leave my marriage? Are my kids going to be destroyed? " 'Where do I buy or find X"

What's the biggest challenge facing your business?

I think that might have just been solved with my new relationship with BlueChilli but I would say that its convincing investors that this platform and community deserve their own vertical instead of being acquired/merged into a larger lifestyle brand.

How do you differentiate your business from your competitors?

Bottom line: Our tone and attitude about this life transition. We perceive a difficult moment as a gateway to your moment of personal success. We promote change and embrace the end as the beginning! As our tagline says "It's over. You're not."

What's the best piece of business advice you've ever received?

Fail fast and cheap, but surround yourself with people who are capable, passionate and share the same vision without the fear of bouncing back -- kinda like what Splitsville's community is all about.

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Comments

half of us will experience divorce at least once in our lives Can we please stop perpetuating the myth that half of marriages end in divorce?
http://psychcentral.com/lib/the-myth-of-the-high-rate-of-divorce/00011473
http://jezebel.com/that-50-percent-divorce-statistic-hasnt-been-true-for-a-1665833364

From 1960 to 2007, the percentage of American women who were married fell from 66% to 51%, and the percentage of men who were married fell from 69% to 55%.

The divorce rate fell from a historic high of 22.6 divorces per 1,000 married women in 1980 to 17.5 in 2007. In real terms, this means that slightly more than 40% of contemporary first marriages are likely to end in divorce, down from approximately 50% in 1980. Perhaps even more important, recent declines in divorce suggest that a clear majority of children who are now born to married couples will grow up with their married mothers and fathers.

Similarly, the decline in marital happiness associated with the tidal wave of divorce in the 1960s and '70s essentially stopped more than two decades ago. Men's marital happiness hovered around 63% from the early 1980s to the mid-2000s, while women's marital happiness fell just a bit, from 62% in the early 1980s to 60% in the mid-2000s.

This good news can be explained largely by three key factors. First, the age at first marriage has risen. In 1970, the median age of marriage was 20.8 for women and 23.2 for men; in 2007, it was 25.6 for women and 27.5 for men. This means that fewer Americans are marrying when they are too immature to forge successful marriages. (It is true that some of the increase in age at first marriage is linked to cohabitation, but not the bulk of it.)